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Monday, 30 January 2017

The Scottish Cup, Round 4: Living in the Past

For lovers of the old trophy, there can be no more romantic side to watch, surely, than Queen’s Park,
the oldest association football club in Scotland and ten times winners of
the Scottish Cup. As I drove to the coast to take in their fourth
round tie at Ayr United, I was full of the joys of a crisp clear
winter’s day and had high hopes for some raw footballing entertainment.

Queen's Park dominated the early years of organised football in Scotland and it was only the advent of professionalism that signalled their demise.

They have retained amateur
status since forming in 1867 and are the only Scottish side to have appeared in
the FA Cup final, having lost successive finals to Blackburn Rovers
in the mid-eighties (that’s the 1880s, sports fans). I also know -because I
looked it up- that in a second round FA Cup tie in 1884, they beat a team
called ‘Manchester’ 15-0. If Jose Mourinho had been in
charge of ‘Manchester’ back then, he would have considered
it to have been only a 12-0 defeat, as two of the goals were
offside and one was a dodgy penalty.

Ayr
is picturesque and its town centre is very pretty in places
but, rather like a beautiful face with several teeth missing, there is
something that stops you short of falling in love with it. The something,
in this case, being the number of charity shops and
empty retail units. I’ve no big objection to charity
shops per se, but it’s never a good sign for the local
economy when there is a clutch of them on your local high
street. You might as well stick up a sign saying: “Inept local council with no
idea of how to support, let alone encourage, business development.” Is it
really beyond the ken of officialdom to devise incentives that would
encourage new businesses to locate in our town centres? Or perhaps these
shops signal a deeper message about the vibrancy (or lack thereof)
within Scottish entrepreneurialism.

The town has
a population of 47,000 and is home to a somewhat under-achieving
football team, with just one domestic cup final to its name in 116
years. Since the arrival of Ian McCall as manager in January 2015, United
have had something of a revival in fortunes. Having narrowly avoided relegation
to the bottom tier of the Scottish League, they won promotion to the second
tier in McCall’s first full season and, given his track record, he would appear
to be someone capable of establishing the club in its natural constituency at
the upper end of the second tier, with occasional sorties into the top flight.

One of the
charms of their home, Somerset Park, is that it looks exactly
like you’d expect the ground of a second or third tier Scottish team
to have looked like back in the day, consisting as it
does of one stand, two covered terraces and an open terrace.
The stand was designed by Archibald Leitch, celebrated for his
distinguished work at Ibrox, White Hart Lane and Goodison Park,
among many others. Somerset’s current capacity is just over 10,000, but as
recently as 1969 it accommodated a scarcely believable 25,000
witnesses to a narrow home triumph over the mighty Rangers.

In one of
Scottish football’s most famous ‘what if’ scenarios, Ayr United came
within an ace of being purchased by David Murray in 1988. Given that Murray
went on to buy Rangers and lead them through their big-spending 9-in-a-row era,
one wonders what would have happened had he taken control of the team he had
supported as a boy. The science in these things is never exact, but I happen to
own a time machine and recently took a trip to an ‘alternative’ 2016 in which
the Scottish champions Ayr International Metals, managed
by Jurgen Klopp, reached the Champions League semi-final, only to
lose to a Harry Styles-inspired Barcelona. It was a funny old game.

At various points in the last twenty years
or so, the club has tried to re-locate, once going so far as to have had
planning permission from South Ayrshire Council to build an all-seater stadium
on the outskirts of town. But somewhere along the line, the Scottish Government
got involved and the deal was banjaxed, reportedly because of concerns about
the retail development aspects of the plan. Ten years ago,
they appeared to have secured a deal to sell their land for housing
but, once again, it came to nothing. On a purely selfish
level, I’m glad that Ayr didn’t move to an out-of-town
development. Standing on the open terracing at a cup tie in January feels
like a quintessentially Scottish pleasure, a bit like eating a deep-fried Mars
Bar or drunkenly dancing to Runrig’s version of ‘The Bonnie Banks o’
Loch Lomond’. I know that modern
customers are supposed to want heated seats and vegetarian sushi on
the menu at half-time, but to attend a game at Somerset
Park is to consent to a visit to the past. In recent years, however, the
club has attracted criticism by revisiting what some would view as a less wholesome aspect of our past. In an act of sexist folly
(or publicity genius, depending on your view),
they have promoted their new kit at the start of each season,
not by featuring anything as mundane as a bunch of footballers actually wearing
the kit; instead, they have opted to publicise these new designs
by hiring topless models to pose with their bodies painted in the
club colours. Progress, however we choose to measure it, still has certain
realities to contend with.

I arrived in plenty of time for kick-off, to find the ground bathed in a beautiful winter light. Had I the slightest clue about how to take
a decent picture on my phone, I would have posted a few more with this
article.

Another thing I like about Somerset Park is that it still has a
grass pitch. I have some sympathy for the clubs who have gone
plastic and I understand the need to maximise income by
capitalising on their assets; concerts, car boot sales and transgendered
interpretive dance events can all take place on a plastic pitch in midweek
without causing concern about wear and tear at the weekend. But
I will admit to having cheered when Celtic manager Brendan Rodgers spoke up
recently for the fuddy-duddy community when, apropos of a visit to Kilmarnock’s
bouncy castle, he said: “I’ve never seen a good game on a plastic pitch.” It
occurred to me that neither had I, although I’m not quite sure why that is
the case. Maybe it’s the way the ball bounces; maybe it’s the way the players
have to adjust how they move across the perfect surfaces; maybe it’s the
feeling that the games often look like glorified training sessions; maybe it’s
the soulless-ness of some of the modern out-of-town stadia, which invariably
seem to favour synthetic surfaces; or maybe I’ve just been unlucky with the games
I’ve attended. But I acknowledge my prejudices when I say
that I cannot bring myself to love a plastic pitch.

The cup-tie drama started
even as the players were warming up, when I discovered
that match programmes were not for sale inside the ground. Having already paid
£12 to get in, I had to ask the stewards for permission to leave
the stadium, buy a programme and return. Such are my
powers of persuasion that I had to speak with three people before this request
was granted. I must have looked quite dangerous in my
middle-aged dad ‘cagoule and wooly hat’ combination, so
it’s easy to understand why permission to nip outside had to be run
past several links in the security chain of command. Upon
consulting the prized publication, I realised that I
was about to experience something new: for the first time ever, I
could claim that I was personally acquainted with a match
referee. In spite of his best efforts to remain inscrutable, I
had occasionally managed to squeeze some football gossip out
of Mr Barry Cook. However, in the interests
of professionalism and confidentiality, the match official’s answers to my comprehensive ‘Good Guy or Wank?’ quiz
on Scottish football managers will remain, for the moment,
unpublished. I noted too, that Ayr’s Operations Manager
was called Tracy McTrusty; in any world subject to the laws
of nominative determinism, Tracy would surely have been appointed club
accountant.

The
programme also featured a nice article on previous Scottish
Cup encounters between Ayr and Queen’s Park. The article
recorded that attendances at previous games had declined
from a bustling 17,200 in February
1938, to a reasonably vibrant 5,200 in 1975. If
statistical trends were your thing, November 2013’s dismal scattering
of 879 must have looked like a calling card from the four
horseman of the apocalypse.

I haven't started to talk about the actual game yet, mainly because there isn’t
a huge amount to talk about. Queen’s Park played some tidy football
and I was impressed by some of the moves they put together. Their manager, Gus MacPherson, was a cup-winner with Kilmarnock in his playing
days and he obviously had them very well-drilled. From a set
piece, their big centre-back had a header cleared off the line, but for
all of their prodding and probing, they seemed to lack a bit
of pace and, in truth, didn’t really look like
scoring. They did, however, at least have an
idea of where the opposing penalty area was and occasionally flirted
with the notion of scoring. Ayr only
flirted with the notion of scoring in the same way that I once flirted with
the notion of going out
with Kate Beckinsale after watching her in a vampire
film. Ayr’s play might best be described as ‘sluggish’, although
to convey the scale of their lassitude, the word ‘play’
should really be in inverted commas. Gary Harkins had a
good run and shot, but it looked more like an individual act of defiance
than part of any coherent strategy. There appeared to be about as much
chance of them scoring as of Russell Howard saying something
funny on television. If I were
feeling generous, I would describe the second half
as being ‘scrappy’ because, had I gone home
at half-time, all I would have missed would have been a mediocre
plate of chips, the sight of the sun going down
behind the Leitch-designed stand and one ridiculous shout
for a penalty, which even the Ayr Ultras looked embarrassed
about.

As
I departed this latest stop in my Scottish
Cup trail, I was aware of the fact that, for the third
successive round, I had managed to attend a game that
ended without a goal being scored. The previous tie,
at Bonnyrigg, had been entertaining at least, while
this one had evoked a frisson of
nostalgia. The first match my father ever took me to was a reserve game
between Rangers and Ayr United, so perhaps I have some romantic attachment to
this wee club from the coast; although, upon reflection, there is no
‘perhaps’ about it. It occurred to me that the things
I was now taking pleasure from – the slightly ramshackle old
ground, the peculiar winter light, the smell of the
grass, the queue for hot food- were all echoes of previous
experiences. Huddling against the cold with fans unaccustomed to
success, investing dreams in the steaming heave of journeyman
endeavour, signalled a desire to connect with a
past that I wanted to exist -one way or another- in the
present.

Towards the
end of the game, the guy on the PA informed us that the man of the
match, “as selected by today’s match sponsors Johnston
and Graham Contractors” was Ayr’s number 8, Robbie Crawford. An old
guy behind me rather summed up the mood of the crowd when he
shouted:

About Me

A few years ago, I promised that I would never start a blog; this is it.
On this blog, I plan to respond to real (or imagined) slights by posting coruscating put-downs of my enemies, competitors and -occasionally- friends. I also plan to maintain the acrimonious simmering of a series of longstanding grudges and petty disputes.
But mainly, the blog will faithfully record a pointless and pedestrian series of idle musings, attempted libels and ill-considered theories about popular culture, sport, politics, music and the meaning of life.
For the last couple of years, I've been writing about an album I'm recording; yes, it's nearly finished.
The views represented on this blog are not necessarily endorsed by the author, unless they are.